BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Although our current home page (BrainKing) is much more detailed than the former one "white background and some short text", it still looks too static to be worth visiting for other than a login purpose. I would like to make it a little different for every single visit. For example:

• Instead of showing static images of sample game boards, we can embed previews of live games, thanks to the new board sizing system, so it won't be a problem to shrink it to fit the tower width. Games can be picked randomly or the most recent ones or games between top players etc.


• It might be interesting to show live previews of all important parts of the site - tournament tables, stairs, team matches, public photo albums, discussion boards.

Any other ideas?

Actually, BrainKing's home page will be the only page that would keep the current castle design (with towers, flying dragon etc.), so it might be really nice to make it a little more attractive. And I like to collect original ideas.

Emails are not reliable. There is too many spam these days, some sources claim that it is about 96% of all sent emails.

To address this problem, we prepared the following improvements for BrainKing 3.0:

• All interaction and communication between BrainKing users and administrators will be done through BrainKing pages.


• Regarding the previous point, the mailbox info@brainking.com will be no longer monitored and probably replaced by something like noreply@brainking.com to indicate that nobody would read a reply to a system generated email (account creation confirm, etc.). Such emails would contain instructions how to contact us properly.


• Contact Us page will use a ticket reporting system instead of sending emails, mostly because there are still many people who do not read the description "we speak English and Czech only". A ticket system (similar to Bug Tracker) should ensure that your request would not be filtered out by an anti-spam email filter and if you use a language we do not speak, it should be easy to assign a volunteer translator who can provide us a translation.


• Additionally, a secret question/answer function could be added to the password recovery feature, in order to eliminate the need to send password recovery emails that could be actually sent from a phishing site. Furthermore, it is not a rare situation when such an email, even properly sent by BrainKing, never reaches the user's mailbox because of anti-spam filtering.

As a result, the only emails generated by BrainKing should be the ones confirming that you created your BrainKing account successfully. When people know that any other emails are probably scam, there is a good chance to increase security of their BrainKing accounts.

As Facebook users have probably noticed, Facebook uses a fixed width layout - no matter how big your web browser window is or what screen resolution you use, the Facebook "active" area always has the same width and is displayed at the center of the window.

BrainKing, on the other hand, uses a flexible width viewport for its inner space. The "towers" (left and right column) are always positioned at the very left and right edge of the browser window, and the main area (inner space) width is automatically adjusted to fill the remaining space.

Fixed layout:
1) Advantages - the page width is always the same, so it is very easy to find the right position and size for any elements you want to place. It is not necessary to optimize the content of "boxes" to fit all possible settings of user web browsers.
2) Disadvantages - if your web browser window width is too small, it won't be capable of displaying the whole page and you would be forced to use the horizontal scrollbar to see the right part of the page. If it is too wide, the page will occupy just the central part and there would be bad looking (and unused) margins. People might be frustrated that they cannot enlarge the active area to put more information there.

Flexible layout:
1) Advantages - the browser window space is always fully used and if you want to show more text without scrolling down the page, it is easy to enlarge the window and get more space.
2) Disadvantages - it requires a more complex system to size and position elements that should be customizable (resize, move, collapse etc.). It might be more difficult for programmers who want to contribute their own applications, regarding their visual design.

Any opinions?

In fact, I always preferred a flexible layout because a narrow content looked terrible on my 30'' monitor when the browser window is maximized, but I agree that I am probably not a typical user of the web. In my opinion, a good compromise - horizontally extendable inner space with fixed width columns - would be the best solution.

First of all, I would like to explain that this article was formerly posted to BrainKing page on Facebook. However, since Facebook does not provide any working protection against abuse and spam, the page was closed and I decided to repost my ideas here. At least, BrainKing.info is under my control.

The article follows:

This is one of the most important planned features for BrainKing 3.0.

As you know, the only current way to make a group of BrainKing users is to create a fellowship and invite paying members to join. However, there are some drawbacks:

• The original purpose of fellowships was to create game teams for team matches and tournaments. It is not a good approach to form a new fellowship only for discussions and pollute the fellowship list with gameless creations.


• It is not possible to invite non-paying members.


• Fellowships are limited to 4 discussion boards only. I have been already asked to increase this number but since the main purpose of fellowships is to play games, such solution would not be preferred.


• Many people join all fellowships they are invited to because they just want to be connected with other people who join all possible fellowships. When everyone is a member of everything, the very purpose of a fellowship membership is pointless.

Our goal is to create a Facebook-like system of user developed pages and groups, featuring discussion boards, photo albums, a smart notification system etc. It would also solve the problem of asking me for new public discussion boards - if there is a topic you would like to discuss with friends or anyone else, just create a page and invite them. Simple and effective.

Our long term goal is to change BrainKing's former business plan (to be a game server and nothing else) and make it closer to the social network idea. I know that there are some hard core players who do not like this idea but I am sure that they would profit on it as well - the more registered users we have, the better is a chance that new game opponents appear for everyone, even for those who just want to play games and nothing else.

Just a side note, I am glad to confirm that BrainKing's December action was successfully and automatically started by BrainKing itself and many people have already caught their bonuses (most of them are lucky enough to get the 100% (red) one).

• Vacation
  • Problem: The vacation system is too complicated. It utilizes weekend days that can be changed occasionally and it allows people to set or clear vacation days in their calendar. We observed that these features produce too many different situations which usually lead to a confusion and sudden loss of games by timeout.
  • Solution: In order to make the days off as simple as possible, it will be no longer possible to change weekend days - they will be fixed to Saturday and Sunday for everyone. Furthermore, the calendar will be removed completely (or reserved for another purpose) and BrainKing will use vacation days only if it is necessary - i.e. if the particular user's games should timeout. In other words, the automatic vacation will be the only way to spend vacation days and it would be enabled for all players of all membership levels.

When the new version of BrainKing is ready, the vacation system will be properly introduced with a good description and examples of typical situations. I am sure that people will get used to it because it is really simple, transparent and, what is the most important, does not allow any kind of cheating.